Real talk: how do you greet Michelle Obama when she's asked you to travel halfway 'round the world with her? With the upcoming release of
To All The Boys: P.S. I Still Love You (sequel to the smash rom-com
To All The Boys I’ve Loved Before), actress Lana Condor has been everywhere—
The Today Show,
Live with Kelly and Ryan, and also, Vietnam. This wasn’t an international press junket though—she was there for a much more philanthropic reason and travelling with perhaps the most inspiring woman in the world—former FLOTUS, Queen of All Queens, Mrs. Michelle Obama.“I don’t know!” Lana blurted when Jimmy Fallon asked her on Wednesday night at
The Tonight Show how she scored such a sweet travel companion. “I got a call!”Well it’s a little more complicated than that, but it all makes sense. A few years ago, Lana
partnered with
The Asia Foundation to create a scholarship for Vietnamese girls to receive a high school education. Lana herself was born in Vietnam and adopted at four-months-old before moving to the U.S., so this scholarship is near and dear to her heart. Michelle Obama has a similar fund,
Girls Opportunity Alliance, which also benefits young women seeking education.
“Our values coincide!” Lana explained. “All of the sudden, I got this phone call, ‘Would you like to go to Vietnam with Mrs. Obama?’ And I was like, 'Uh YES. I absolutely would. I’ll leave now!'” Her reaction is pretty much how we would react, except we might have to call the morgue because. We. Would. Die.That's when Lana was met with an interesting dilemma: how do you greet Her Royal Highness Michelle Obama? “I stayed up all night long for, like, months, thinking, like, ‘How will I greet her?’ Like, it's not the monarch, so you don't bow. But she's my Queen!” #Facts.So what did she do when the
big moment came? “I just froze. And when she walked in, I was, like, frozen... And she just came in and like, gave me a big hug in her beautiful arms. And I was like, ‘I love you.’” See? This is why Lana Condor is ALL OF US.What puts a cherry on top of this story is that she also got the opportunity to
meet Barack Obama, but she spent the entire conversation gushing about how Michelle is amazing. The former president’s reply? “I get that all the time.” We've said it before and we'll say it again: Obamas = relationship goals.[video_embed id='1886857']RELATED: Noah Centineo and Lana Condor tell us how their lives have changed ahead of ‘To All the Boys 2’[/video_embed]On a more personal level, we can just imagine emotions running high in general for Lana during this trip. Her adventure was also in many ways a journey home, because, as she tells it, she hadn’t been in Vietnam since she was adopted all those years ago. She also recalled to Jimmy the experience of seeing the orphanage (now a nursing home) where she spent the first four months of her life."The curtains, the paint, like, the windows, everything was the same," she said. "And then right after that I got to go work with Mrs. Obama and speak to girls about the importance of education." What a beautiful full-circle moment.Watch
The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon weeknights at 11:35 p.m. ET on CTV.[video_embed id='1887130']BEFORE YOU GO: Brad Pitt is not above wearing a name tag[/video_embed]
